Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.

This study analyzes China's industrial energy consumption trends from 1996 to 2010 with a focus on the impact of the Top-1000 Enterprises Energy-Saving Program and the Ten Key Energy-Saving Projects. From 1996 to 2010, China's industrial energy consumption increased by 134%, even as the industrial economic energy intensity decreased by 46%. Decomposition analysis shows that the production effect was the dominant cause of the rapid growth in industrial energy consumption, while the efficiency effect was the major factor slowing the growth of industrial energy consumption. The structural effect had a relatively small and fluctuating influence. Analysis shows the strong association of industrial energy consumption with the growth of China's economy and changing energy policies. An assessment of the Top-1000 Enterprises Energy-Saving Program and the Ten Key Energy-Saving Projects indicates that the economic energy intensity of major energy-intensive industrial sub-sectors, as well as the physical energy intensity of major energy-intensive industrial products, decreased significantly during China's 11th Five Year Plan (FYP) period (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010). This study also shows the importance and challenge of realizing structural change toward less energy-intensive activities in China during the 12th FYP period (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015).

In 2009, China committed to reducing its carbon dioxide intensity (CO 2 /unit of gross domestic product, GDP) by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from a 2005 baseline and in March 2011, China's 12 th Five-Year Plan established a carbon intensity reduction goal of 17% between 2011 and 2015. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China then established a Low Carbon City policy and announced the selection of five provinces and eight cities to pilot the low carbon development work. How to determine if a city or province is "low carbon" has not been defined by the Chinese government.Macro-level indicators of low carbon development, such as energy use or CO 2 emissions per unit of GDP or per capita may be too aggregated to be meaningful measurements of whether a city or province is truly "low carbon". Instead, indicators based on energy end-use sectors (industry, residential, commercial, transport, electric power) offer a better approach for defining "low carbon" and for taking action to reduce energy-related carbon emissions.This report presents and tests a methodology for the development of a low carbon indicator system at the provincial and city level, providing initial results for an end-use low carbon indicator system, based on data available at the provincial and municipal levels. The report begins with a discussion of macro-level indicators that are typically used for inter-city, regional, or inter-country comparisons. It then turns to a discussion of the methodology used to develop a more robust low carbon indicator for China. The report presents the results of this indicator with examples for six selected provinces and cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shanxi, Shandong, Guangdong, and Hubei). The report concludes with a discussion of data issues and other problems encountered during the development of the end-use low carbon indicator, followed by recommendations for future improvement.